If you have a laptop then you surely have been in a situation where you need to have a secure connection while on the move. This is most important when you are at a random hotspot and need to log into a non-secure site (authentication over http) or do not trust the vendor providing the connection. If you have access to a server running SSH then you can use a great feature in openssh to set up a SOCKS proxy and route all your traffic through. This is very similar to VPN’ing but you can do it on the fly and dont have to have an special client software on your machine.

This is written specifically for Unix based systems with some stuff even more specific for Gnome. If you are using Mac OSX, Linux or Unix variants you can set up the proxy with the commands but telling your system to use the tunnel may vary. Under windows there is a way to perform all these same things with putty, my apologies for not covering that here. If you are a windows user and cant find any good documentation please let me know I would be happy to write it up. Read more…